Performing Understanding: How to Really Know What Students Know

It's a familiar scene: you teach all week, your students take a unit test, most do pretty well, and in a week—poof!—the learning is (mostly) gone. In fact, given what we know from the learning sciences, that new knowledge wasn't all that secure in the first place.

And so it's hard to move on, but you have to. And then next year's teachers wonder aloud, "Why did they never learn this?" and somehow you're to blame. This scenario doesn't offer a great window into what students are really learning, and that's why it's critical for them to perform or demonstrate their understanding.

If you are hoping to introduce and scale a practice of performance assessments, we can help. The key to performing understanding is less about big, weeks-long projects (though that can be a possibility) and more about being precise about the kinds of thinking you want your students to do. Designed in the right way, you can ensure that even a multiple-choice bubble test can still be a means to get kids to demonstrate their deep understanding.

Please schedule a free hour-long meeting with the LifeReady Hub Team.